The manipulation of light has a wide variety of applications in imaging, sensing, communications and optical applications. Optical components, such as lenses, mirrors, prisms, and diffraction gratings, can interact and alter the properties of light in various ways. However, these optical components are often bulky, thus difficult to integrate into modern optical systems that continue to shrink in size.
In conventional optical systems, glass or metallic gratings have been used to reflect and refract light in the visible and near-infrared spectrum range. These gratings, however, are lossy due to oxide or metal absorption in the visible and near-infrared spectrum range, thus adversely limiting the power efficiency of the conventional optical systems. Also, the conventional grating structures can only perform a single function at a time, with no general automatic design methodology present for arbitrary waveform profiles.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a low loss optical structure that can provide a range of functionalities for optical light manipulation both in and beyond the visible and near-infrared spectrum range.